Anthony Bourdain defines “food porn” as “the glorification of food as a substitute for sex.” As with food porn, wine porn — to paraphrase Bourdain — describes certain mind-blowingly hedonistic and expensive wines for an audience that has little intention of actually drinking them. If Wine Spectator and Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate are the respective Penthouse and Hustler of wine publications, then the 7th Annual Heart’s Delight Wine Tasting and Auction — running from Thursday, May 11 through Saturday, May 13 at locations in and around Washington — is the industry’s blockbuster AVN Awards Show. And if you’re willing to shell out enough cash, you can buy yourself a role as a wine pornstar for a day — or three.
The three-day bacchanal, which benefits the American Heart Association, kicks off on Thursday night with 15 separate posh dinners at restaurants, private homes, and embassies — each of which will highlights a chef and a winemaker. Nine of the Thursday dinners (including a Sauternes dinner at 1789, a Bordeaux dinner at Le Paradou, three embassy dinners, and a Robert Wiedmeier-helmed dinner at a private home) are already sold out or pre-allocated. Among the six dinners you may still attend, two “cheap” $250-a-head dinners remain open, as does a higher-end $650 dinner featuring food prepared by Veritas‘ Scott Bryan and wines from the venerable Chateau Margaux — a famed Bordeaux winery that produces cabernet sauvignon-based blends as expensive as they are outstanding.
Not yet spent? On Friday night, the real hot-and-heavy stuff goes down with a $1,000-per-person, black-tie “Vintners Dinner” at the Mellon Auditorium on Constitution Avenue. With Wine Spectator executive editor Thomas Matthews and Master of Wine Serena Sutcliffe on hand for the festivities, attendees will gorge themselves on food, and drink four vintages of Chateau Margaux wines — which will be spotlighted here as well. To give you some idea of the astronomical cost of Margaux, this DCist once purchased a single glass of 1982 Chateau Margaux for about $50 at L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Paris. To give you an even better idea, it was a steal at that price. And yes, that’s absolutely and completely obscene.
